The Atavist

Was the dust bad for the environment? Maybe. But everyone at the plant acted like it was harmless. To prove this, a plant manager once sprinkled some on his sandwich and ate it. Jenkins and his coworkers rarely wore respirators—only when the quantity of dust “got so bad that breathing or seeing was impossible,” Jenkins later said. They never changed out of their white coveralls for lunch. Dust clung to their clothing, spreading radiation wherever they went.

The midwife said Rachel must have had an early miscarriage, but Rachel insisted to her mother that she hadn’t. Becky was bewildered. When she later discussed it with her daughter, Rachel drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper. On one side she put evidence of a possible miscarriage, like the bleeding she’d experienced; on the other, she listed what she and her husband, Josh Piland, were doing to stand in faith for a healthy baby, such as buying a car big enough to fit three kids. She told her mom that God would not put death in her body.

Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever—because the government had accused their father of not paying his taxes. It wasn’t true, Leah insisted. Still, with federal agents searching for John, the family had to leave. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. Leah told her daughters that they would never see their friends again. They couldn’t even call them to say goodbye.

No longer would I be the younger sibling, squirming under his rule. Never again would he take an offhand remark about spilled water and turn it into an hour-long battle of wills that I was sure to lose. No more would I have to endure his dorky jokes. His too-loud squawk of a public laugh. His OCD-like finger-sniffing habit. His Grateful Dead bootlegs. His cajoling. His hectoring. His preternaturally stinky feet. His awkward and uncool way with girls. His insistence on making and then standing by claims I knew—I knew so hard—were not true. Impossible. The way he drew out my name, annoyingly, when he wanted something: “C’mon, Maaa-uhhhh-cccccc.” His never failing to upbraid me because he believed I ordered terribly in restaurants and should look the waiter in the eye and speak louder. His related feeling that he’d always ordered the best thing on the menu, far superior to what I’d gotten. His stoner friends. His egg breath. His egg farts. His tie-dyed T-shirts. His mirrored shades. His fondness for wizards. Fairies. Led Zeppelin tropes. His confidence in his own coolness. His unstoppable loyalty to me. His belief in me. His belief I could do better, try harder. His pushing me. To move, move, move to Los Angeles. Take acting lessons. Buy a motorcycle. Ride around in the endless summer. 

Morrison didn’t want to create market conditions that fueled the very activities he sought to curb, so he bought meat and antlers selectively—just enough to gather evidence against each poacher he was after—and bargained relentlessly below market value. Still, what he offered was more than many in the valley had seen in several lean years. “Once they got faith in us, we couldn’t get rid of them,” Bensley said. “I mean, they just would not stop killing.”

In a world without computers, the physical documents containing the personal information of draft-eligible men might have been the only materials linking them to the Selective Service. “ I often thought, what about the women who worked in those offices?” Jim Good said. “Did they see those files as death certificates?” He and other peace activists came to view the contents of draft boards’ filing cabinets as no different from bombs or bullets: They were just tools that helped the government kill. Crucially, destroying files could be accomplished without any violence, unless you counted the destruction of property, which raiders did not. They believed that some property simply didn’t have a right to exist. 

The rules in the contract the musicians had signed stated that they could not “take food from the refrigerator outside of the assigned meal times.” As a result, the musicians were constantly hungry. Ordóñez told me that there were times he begged strangers for food. Several musicians fell ill from the exhausting performance schedule. Ordóñez recalled playing a show in Cardiff with a fever of 105 degrees. “It was as if they were testing how far we could go, constantly pushing the limits of the human body,” he said.

Imagine this: While you are showering, or making your coffee, or listening to music, a voice or several, known or new to you, quiet or very loud, are saying things so vile that you do not want to disturb anyone else with what you are hearing. Those voices are more insistent than the music playing, the coffee brewing, or the water running in the shower. They seem to know you. Now try to think while you’re hearing those voices. Now try to act.

“He was the lawless lawman,” said Sheryl Threadgill Matthews, who at 15 became one of the first of two Black students to integrate Wilcox County High School. There was no police protection for students like Matthews, and no punishment for the classmates who verbally and physically abused her. She wasn’t getting much of an education, she said, so her enrollment lasted only a year before she returned to Camden Academy, the Black Presbyterian secondary school where her father, the Reverend Thomas Threadgill, was a chaplain. “Lummie didn’t play by the book,” Matthews told me. “He did whatever he wanted.”

Few people in the United States were talking about femicide. There were no official inquiries, no sustained mass protests, no mobilization against misogynistic murders, even as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault accelerated. Men killing women was more often the subject of entertainment—podcasts, documentaries, entire TV networks—than public action or legislation. This was in keeping with a long history in the United States of treating women’s murders as everyday tragedies. Caroline Davidson, a law professor at Willamette University, told me that when Congress was drafting hate-crime legislation decades ago, gender-based violence was considered “too prevalent and too common” to merit inclusion. “It would wind up swallowing the entire category of hate crimes,” she said.

Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.

In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?

Six other crew members were near Deal and Erwin, hanging on to girders as wires snapped and the ship’s interior frame shattered. No one screamed. No one said a word, perhaps because there was nothing they could do.

Tall and broad shouldered, with his short hair conked and split into a stylish side part, Bruseaux cultivated an air of old money, wearing the finely cut suits favored by bankers. (He’d one day be included on a list of the city’s best-dressed men.) Along with other investigative services, Bruseaux offered to shadow unfaithful spouses and locate lost relatives—a common concern for families whose members had been separated during the migration north. His agency made use of emerging technologies like fingerprinting, listening devices, and hidden cameras. Ambitious from the start, Bruseaux made it known that he was available for jobs anywhere in the country, publicizing his business with the slogan “We Cover the World.”

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“If you fucking move,” Hasty replied, “I’ll kill you as you stand there.”

Their conversation turned to cases of suicide in the camps. “Whether we survive is neither certain nor the main point,” Ossietzky insisted. “But how people think about us later is as important as that they think about us. In that, our future lies. Thus, we have to keep living here as long as we breathe. A Germany that thinks of us will be a better Germany.”